Is it truly awards season without controversy?

Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards show is only days away, and as is yearly tradition, the nominees chosen for the various awards have led to no end of discourse. From Shadow of the Erdtree’s nomination for “Game of the Year” causing drama over the inclusion of DLC, to Astro Bot’s victory causing “serious gamers” to go wild, every new yearly show brings fresh drama with it. 

This year, it is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 causing the issue. 

Fresh off an absolute sweep of the Golden Joystick awards, Expedition 33 is poised for a repeat performance on December 11th’s awards show. Expedition 33 is now the most-nominated title in the history of The Game Awards, with a whopping 13 nominations. This naturally includes for “Game of the Year,” but also for categories like “Best Independent Game” and “Best Score and Music”. It is with that former award, with which a number of people take issue.

Why is that? Well, many folks don’t consider Expedition 33 to be an indie game. 

Narrowing down why this belief is held, is a bit more tricky. To some folks, it seems to primarily be a vibes-based scenario. Expedition 33 isn’t an indie game, because it doesn’t feel like an indie game. To these folks, an indie game is something like Stardew Valley, Undertale, Among Us, or Hollow Knight. Primarily 2D games with limited scope. 3D indie games are ones like A Short Hike, with simplified, often polygonal graphics. Certainly something as beautiful and cinematic as Expedition 33, or even a game like BlueTwelve Studios’ Stray, shouldn’t really count as an indie game, right? 

Others push against Expedition 33’s inclusion as an indie game on the basis of development team size, claiming that true indie games are those with intimately small development teams, such as indie darling Bastion with a seven-person development team, and especially solo-led efforts such as Stardew Valley. How can Expedition 33 be truly considered an indie game, so these folks argue, with a credits that lists outsourcing to more than 400 people?

The last major argument tends to target Expedition 33’s publisher, Kepler Interactive. Many folks consider an actual indie to be one that is true to the name, and is self-published. Only truly independent, self-published games, can count as indie games. The recently released Angeline Era is a prime example, being both developed and published by Analgesic Productions of Anodyne fame. That is a truly independent game, with no ties to AAA publishers at all. Expedition 33 has a publisher which financed the title, and it is argued that prevents it from being a true indie.

Of course while all of these arguments make some degree of sense, there are plenty of counterpoints as well. Expedition 33 might not feel like an indie game due to the impressive graphics and inherent cinematic nature, but that would also apply to something like the Plague Tale series, which most people seem fine accepting as an indie. Expedition 33 may have received a lot of outsourced help, but the exact same thing is true of Sea of Stars from Sabotage Studios, which again, is never questioned as an indie title. The publisher argument is weakest of all, as this would cast aspersion over countless indies which rely on publishers, to the degree that certain publishers such as Devolver Digital and Annapurna Interactive have begun to specialize in publishing indie titles. You’ll never convince me What Remains of Edith Finch isn’t an indie because it isn’t self-published, and the same goes for Expedition 33.

It may be possible that Expedition 33 fails to qualify as an indie because of a healthy mix of all these categories, but that simply goes to show how subjective and malleable the term “indie” is as a label, to the degree that it becomes difficult to have these conversations at all, when everybody is operating with a different definition.

All I know is that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a damn good game, whether it is an indie or not.

What do you think? Does Expedition 33 deserve the indie nomination?  Did you vote for it? What do you consider to be an indie game? Let us know in the comments below!

Featured Image: Sandfall Interactive